


stay young, go dancing

by brophigenia



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Art Museum Curator Caroline Forbes, Bonnie Bennett/Questionable Romantic Decisions, Cliches abound, Crime Family Mikaelsons, Eccentric Artist Millionaire Klaus Mikaelson, Elijah/Expensive Suits/Happiness, F/M, In A Lighthearted Way, Matchmaking, Minor Mentions of Past Caroline Forbes/Katherine Pierce, Minor Mentions of Past Drug Use, Past Bonnie Bennett/Jeremy Gilbert, Past Bonnie Bennett/Kai Parker, Past Bonnie Bennett/Professor Shane, Sort of? - Freeform, Stranded Together, Wedding, lucky blue porcelain tea service, road trip fic, the real ot3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-21 06:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11938155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: life is sweetin the belly of the beast





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klarolineagainnaturally](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klarolineagainnaturally/gifts).



> Okay, so I originally planned to write something hugely epic. 
> 
> Instead, here is something else. The first chapter is technically the fill for your request, and the second chapter has the beginning of the hugely epic fic and not!fic at the end to give everything more context. I'm a teacher and school just started and was crazier than I thought it would be, but I fully intend to return to this universe and write the epic fic you deserve, my giftee! 
> 
> I hope you like what I have!

_ This is all your fault, Klaus!  _ Caroline swears, and he ducks his head and plays at being remorseful for any of it. Her feet are bare on the hardwood. Her toenails are lacquered a bright, cheery pink that matches the flush beneath her skin at her knees, her elbows, her cheeks. He grins, hidden away from her accusatory eyes, and schools his expression into something more broody and contrite before he looks up through his eyelashes at her. 

_ I'm sorry, luv.  _ He  manages to sound halfway truthful, at least, even though that couldn't be further from the truth.  _ We’ll be on our way again in the morning.  _

Caroline throws her hands up at his attempts at placation, even if her cheeks bloom a little pinker and her eyes dilate a tad.  _ Ah,  _ he thinks, both fond and predatory,  _ got you.  _

The weather outside is frightful to be sure, and Klaus watches her attempts at starting a fire in the fireplace for a few amusing minutes before stepping forward to offer his services. Terrifyingly competent at everything under the sun and yet she can't build a fire.  _ A Girl Guide you were not, it seems,  _ he murmurs in her ear, deliberately soft to stir the delicate hairs on the back of her neck, exposed by the fetching way she'd drawn her hair up into a chignon. She huffs and her mouth twists like she's trying not to smile when he kneels down beside her and takes up the flint she'd had in the emergency kit in her trunk, stocked to the brim with everything one could feasibly need to survive a disaster scenario, up to and including an inflatable raft.  _ I like to be prepared _ , she'd sniffed when he'd turned incredulous eyes upon her, flicking them from her face to the truly  _ gigantic  _ Tupperware tote marked  _ in case of emergency  _ in her neat, even hand, thick black Sharpie on bright blue plastic. 

He coaxes a roaring fire in no time flat, the motions coming easy after spending his childhood doing it twice each day. Caroline has inflated the raft and filled it with crackling Mylar shock blankets and the two threadbare quilts they'd found in a trunk at the end of the bed frame in the master bedroom, bereft of a mattress. Her fingers run restlessly over the hand-done stitches, tracing their uneven gait, admiring their colors and block patterns. 

_We'd best share warmth,_ he informs her once he's done, fingers toying with the hem of his shirt, rucking it _just_ _so_ a strip of his abs are on display. 

_ Is that what we'd  _ best  _ do?  _ Caroline fires back, raising her eyebrows imperiously. He's sure he'll never feel this way for anyone else, ever again-- Caroline Forbes unwinds his tension and makes him  _ laugh  _ even while he's still feverish in his desire for her. Elijah agrees with him on this front if no others, says  _ her practicality would temper your recklessness, and her innate dreaminess would mesh well with your more  _ artistic  _ nature, brother  _ because he's a Mikaelson and they're all a bit ridiculous and melodramatic and prone to pensive monologues with big words, as if they're all auditioning for an off-Broadway production of  _ Hamlet.  _

Elijah has agreed with him on this for  _ years,  _ since Caroline was just a fiery slip of a golden-haired spitfire and Kol was still making plans to burn down the Mystic Falls High School gymnasium, that he may never be subjected to such  _ plebeian respites _ as  _ basketball  _ and  _ football  _ again _.  _

_ Give me lacrosse or give me death,  _ he'd whine dramatically, and daily, after Klaus forced him to join the football team so that he had an excuse to park in front of the expanse of field where the cheerleaders practiced, waiting to pick up his little brother, Kol’s senior year. No matter how aloof and  _ mysteriously alluring  _ he tried to be, propped against the Range Rover’s door, Caroline never even spared him a glance, leading her Mystic Falls Timberwolf Cheerleaders through all manner of complicated choreography, shimmying and flipping about gracefully in that tight little red uniform that still featured so prominently in his guiltiest daydreams. 

When he’d seen her again in New York City it felt entirely like fate, Elijah at his side in one of those Savile Row suits that did nothing to make him look  _ less  _ like a mob hitman masquerading as an accountant, the both of them there to negotiate Klaus’ latest collection being displayed in a museum’s contemporary art gallery.  _ Her  _ museum’s contemporary art gallery. 

She’d been assigned to wine and dine them by her superiors; in the early hours of the next morning he’d had her pinned between her apartment's soft mattress and his calloused hands; it had felt like touching a previously-undiscovered marble statue from Ancient Greece and not like that  _ at all,  _ it had been reverence in one second and joyous chaos the next.  _ Caroline Forbes,  _ who had driven him mad for  _ years,  _ hundreds of miles away from their shared origins in Mystic Falls, and  _ who would’ve thought?  _

He’d boarded the plane from New Orleans and been overcome with the  _ tediousness  _ of it all, had drunk enough scotch to make him half-crosseyed and then slept fully clothed on the  _ obscenely  _ sumptuous bed in the larger of the two bedrooms that the suite that Elijah had booked for them had to offer. When it had come time to meet with the curators and directors and what-have-you, he’d been sober and irritated and ready to greet them in his rumpled henley and jeans. Elijah had drawn the line there, eyebrows raised and eyes occasionally rolling upwards to appeal to a higher power, as if he was some sort of martyr and not a ridiculous pain in Klaus’ arse. 

(He’d been grateful for his older brother later, when he was wearing the deep crimson suit that Elijah had packed for him and Caroline’s eyes widened as they traveled down to his  _ impeccably  _ tailored trousers and hurriedly back up again.) 

Kol announcing his engagement to the Bennett girl was even  _ more  _ ridiculously fortuitous, and after some subterfuge and luck (both good and bad) here they were, in a setup more suited for a romantic comedy than real life, stranded in a cabin in the backwoods of Georgia in the dead of winter with nothing but their wits, the Bennett family china, and Caroline’s immense first aid/emergency preparedness kit. 

_ Yes,  _ Klaus responds, making his face as earnest as possible,  _ lest you freeze off those pretty little fingers and toes.  _

Caroline laughs at that outright; the dead of winter in Georgia is still warmer than New York City in the springtime, and with the fire now crackling merrily and their nest of Mylar and faded cotton constructed to the best of her ability, they’re facing down nothing but the promise of a warm night’s sleep and the threat of being  _ intimately close  _ to someone with whom they’ve previously had absolutely  _ mind-blowing  _ sex with. Not that she will ever admit that last part to anyone. Anyone, but  _ especially  _ Klaus.    
  
(She’s  _ also  _ not going to cop to the fact that she’s not had sex with anyone since him. Him, eleven  _ freaking  _ months ago. Eleven months, twelve days, and however many minutes ago.) 

_ Alright, Snowpiercer,  _ she manages to finally stop laughing long enough to say, unable to keep the reckless fondness from her voice. She’s always liked him too much; when she was eighteen it felt like his hot gaze would melt her skin right off her bones. She’d wanted him too much then, and wanted him too much eleven months ago, and wants him too much now. The only difference is that she’s exhausted from driving and running around like a chicken with its head cut off and Klaus is  _ so  _ handsome in firelight and she’s having trouble remembering  _ why  _ it’s a bad thing that she wants him. 

So she ignores his muttered  _ I’d gladly eat  _ you  _ any day of the week, ice-age-apocalyptic setting or no  _ and strips off enough of her clothes that she won’t be hideously uncomfortable in the night. 

When he lays down beside her she shivers at the first brush of their bare skin together; he’s  _ hatefully  _ gorgeous, and it’s all utterly unfair, but he smells good and she finds herself slipping off to sleep quicker than she’d anticipated with his breath stirring against her shoulder and his hand spread out wide on her ribs, palm hot like a brand against her sternum. 

_ I wish I didn’t like you so much,  _ she mumbles sleepily, because an exhausted Caroline is a Caroline with no filter, and it’s true. It would be so much easier to ignore this physical attraction if it weren’t for how well their personalities meshed. 

He laughed into her hair and she’d have been more offended, but the sound was full of wonder and adoration, like nobody had ever told him that they liked him before. 

_ I fancy you rotten, Caroline Forbes,  _ he breathed, like a secret, and she meant to say something back, really she did, except then she was asleep. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

She doesn't want to go to the wedding in the first place. 

Like, okay. She  _ loves  _ Bonnie. She really, truly does-- and she's super happy that Bonnie is happy and that she's marrying the, quote,  _ man of her dreams,  _ unquote. Is she baffled that the man of Bonnie’s dreams is also the psychopath who  _ totally  _ tried to burn the high school down when he was a freshman? Maybe. Is she perplexed at the prospect of Bonnie marrying the guy who thought that staging a reenactment of  _ that scene  _ in Carrie was the  _ perfect _ senior prank to pull on their  _ principal _ at  _ graduation?  _ Possibly. Is she  _ utterly floored  _ by Bonnie’s insistence that her fiance’s desire to become an  _ underwater basket weaver-slash-treasure hunting deep sea diver  _ is a feasible way to spend his time and parents’ fat stacks of cash? Seems likely. 

Caroline is just, she's  _ concerned.  _ But she's used to being concerned about the state of Bonnie Bennett’s love life-- she'd dated Elena’s stoner anime-loving younger brother, and that creepy community college professor, and  _ Kai Parker.  _ That last one spoke for itself-- Crazy Kai was  _ totally  _ chilling in a cell in the Virginia State Penitentiary for the next nineteen years. And yes, okay, maybe he didn't  _ really  _ count as one of Bonnie’s terrible exes because they'd dated in  _ middle school  _ and only ever went bowling with Caroline and her steady stream of beaux and Elena and Matt, but  _ still.  _ She'd said  _ yeah sure  _ when Crazy Kai had caught her alone at the water fountain to ask her to be his girlfriend, and then they'd been Facebook official for like three months. It  _ totally  _ counted, and Caroline could  _ totally  _ use it against her. Even now. 

The point is, Caroline is  _ insanely busy  _ at work. Her boss has put her in charge of negotiating a deal with the freaking  _ Louvre  _ to get some of their (lesser known but still priceless and  _ historically significant _ ) Impressionist pieces on loan for the season, and she's expected to deal with  _ that _ whole mess using the French Language minor that she earned mostly through watching a lot of French  _ art house films  _ (read: soft-core pornos with tragic and incomprehensible endings) and mainlining Red Bull the night before her capstone course’s final. She's  _ also  _ still got to deal with her usual workload of shouting at incompetent interns and doing back-breaking manual labor that  _ was not  _ in the job description she first found on the Museum’s webpage four nights deep into her post-graduation  _ what the hell am I gonna do with an M.A. in Art History  _ bender, curled around a toilet in a dirty subway station bathroom stall, trying to distract herself from how she was puking up all the tequila she'd consumed in the last seventy-two hours. 

She's insanely busy at work, and at the end of the day on Friday she doesn't want to go down to the bodega for  _ toilet paper,  _ much less schlep halfway across the country to watch her best friend marry a  _ crazy basket weaving hobo.  _ No matter that he’s  _ also  _ a millionaire trust fund baby.  _ Basket weaving hobo.  _ He lived on a  _ boat.  _ A freaking  _ boat.  _

She loves Bonnie, though, so when she gets off work ( _ technically-- _ in  _ reality _ , her boss expects her to always be on call, available via telephone and email and carrier pigeon; y’know, the usual) on the Friday before Bonnie’s Wednesday wedding, she goes to the airport and sleeps her way through a flight to Chicago and then a vibratory connector flight on a plane the size of a Prius to Mystic Falls’ sad excuse for an airport.

***

The whole detour in Mystic Falls is all Bonnie’s fault. 

Well, and Grams’. 

Caroline loves the woman, but Sheila Bennett is honestly going to be the death of her. She’s known it since they were young, and Sheila _always_ knew when she and Bonnie were planning on sneaking out. And then when Sheila found out about her (brief and _terribly_ ill-advised) fling with Elena’s cousin (on her birth mom’s side) Katherine, and Katherine’s supply of Xanax and semi-expensive vodka and then called her _mom,_ the _Sheriff_ , to stage an intervention. 

(Mrs. Gilbert made cupcakes and everything. It remains one of the most bizarrely unpleasant tea party experiences of Caroline’s life, second only to when Mrs. Lockwood attempted to throw Tyler a  _ coming-out _ brunch at age fourteen and didn’t realize the modern-day connotations of the phrase before she sent invitations to all the kids in their grade.)

And  _ now _ , with Sheila calling up Bonnie a week before the wedding to say  _ oh, Bonnie, I hope you weren’t planning on being married without the Bennett Family Dishes!  _

Caroline had been carrying a priceless (read:  _ heavy _ ) Ancient Egyptian vase when Bonnie had called her about it, so she was still  _ slightly  _ fuzzy on the details, but apparently it boiled down to the fact that those dishes, a set of blue-patterned china with gold gilding, had been used during every single Bennett wedding reception of the last ninety-odd years except for Bonnie’s parents’, and none of  _ those  _ weddings had ended in divorce. They were  _ lucky,  _ and  _ fragile,  _ and  _ someone  _ had to make sure that they made it to Miami in time for Bonnie and Kol to say ‘I do.’ Via  _ automobile,  _ like she was a modern-day Phineas Fogg. A  _ way better dressed _ modern-day Phineas Fogg.

And  _ apparently,  _ since Grams had pled  _ old age  _ and Elena and Damon were about to have another baby and weren’t going to drive the two they already had all the way to Miami, that left one person who Bonnie  _ trusted  _ to transport them. 

Caroline sometimes wished that she wasn’t the dependable friend. If she were more of a flake, like, say, Elena, then she’d have some ironclad excuse like  _ oh I’m sorry, I’m six months pregnant and also if I have to spend twenty-plus hours trapped in a car with my husband and two screaming brats, I am going to commit homicide.  _ As it was, Caroline had no boyfriend, no health restrictions, no attitude-problem-afflicted spawn, and had enough sick time accumulated at work that the people in Human Resources had taken to passive aggressively sending her brochures for spa-resorts in Maui and idyllic ski lodges in Switzerland. 

But, no. Caroline was  _ dependable,  _ so that meant she was now she was now chauffeur and bodyguard to a  _ tea service.  _

Which was  _ great.  _ Really. 

***

Neither Elena nor Damon answer the door at the Boarding House when Caroline knocks. Instead, four year old Giuseppe does. Caroline squats down to his level, silently cursing her aching back. She’s too young for  _ arthritis.  _ She’s going to need a hip replacement at the rate things are going. She needs to find a shiatsu studio. Was shiatsu what you did when you had a bad back? She needed  _ something,  _ was the point. 

(And  _ not,  _ as her coworker Enzo would drawl slyly over the rim of his glass at the bar,  _ to get laid.  _ Well, Enzo would say  _ thoroughly shagged, darling  _ because he was a sleaze and he’d watched way too much Austin Powers during his formative teenage years. He was the  _ worst  _ Human Resources Officer ever.) 

She tore her thoughts away from Enzo and drinking and the fact that she hadn’t gotten laid in approximately eleven months, nine days, and forty…  _ nine  _ minutes to smile brightly at her not-godson. But hey, she wasn’t still  _ slightly  _ upset that they’d picked Bonnie and Stefan to be the godparents. Nope. No siree. She was Caroline Forbes. She wasn’t petty. 

“Hey, Seppy. Where’s Mom and Dad?” Giuseppe blinked up at her sleepily with his Salvatore-blue eyes, his ever-present ratty rhino plush clutched in one hand. 

“No,” he answered decisively, finally, and she sighed gustily, swinging him up onto her hip with only a  _ bit  _ of a wince. The kid had definitely not inherited his mother’s effortlessly thin build, that was for sure. Or maybe she just needed to go to the gym more often. 

“Hello? Elena? Damon?” She called, walking down the main hall, only to have someone come up behind her and clap a hand over her mouth. Shrieking, she clutched Giuseppe closer and resisted the urge to toss him right at her attacker and take off running. 

“Blondie, if you wake up the baby or my wife I will  _ skin you. _ ” Damon hissed in her ear, hand still clamped tightly over her mouth. She rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue, snorting at his softly exclaimed  _ ew, gross!  _ The man had two kids and another on the way and was still grossed out by  _ saliva.  _ That explained  _ plenty  _ about why Elena always looked so exhausted. Two kids, a surgical residency, another kid on the way. Elena’s ever-present smiles were  _ obviously  _ the result of sleep deprivation. She was probably in a constant state of hallucination. 

Or… maybe she just genuinely  _ enjoyed  _ being exhausted and pestered and irritated and facing down the imminent threat of labor pains. Caroline couldn’t say either way. She’d been friends with Elena since they were Seppy’s age, and she still couldn’t figure her out.

“Damon, you aren’t scary. It’s 2017. We have  _ all  _ seen  _ Sherlock _ .” Caroline snarked, albeit softly. 

“Whatever, Jane Moriarty.” Damon mumbled, because he was a child who couldn’t even keep his Arthur Conan Doyle popular culture references straight. (Possibly, she spent too much of her free time binge-watching Netflix while walking on the treadmill and stuffing her face full of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Halo Top.) “Are you headed over to Sheila’s tonight, or?” 

“If I’m going to make it to New Orleans in time to pick up Kol’s brother, then yeah, I’d better leave tonight, Damon. Though, I still don’t understand why  _ I  _ have to be the one to drive those damn plates.” She’d trailed off into a mumbled grumble by the end of her explanation, and Damon gave her one of his trademark annoyingly perky grins, reaching out to steal Seppy from her arms. Caroline couldn’t even be mad about the baby thievery, either, because Seppy’s softly mumbled  _ hi Daddy  _ and the way he nuzzled his face into Damon’s neck was  _ seriously  _ the cutest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. 

Damon led her through the house to the garage; Elena was passed out on the couch, limbs still elegantly slim though her stomach was the size of a basketball, curled up on her side around her baby bump and drooling. The sight was unfairly cute, too, and Caroline stroked a hand over her friend’s bare calf as they passed her, absently fond. 

She  _ did  _ love Elena, however hard on her she could be, however much the jealousy of their childhood still tried to rear its head now. 

(The problem hadn’t ever truly been that she was jealous  _ of  _ Elena. That sort of thing was natural, when you were around Elena Gilbert, Mystic Falls’ dark-haired golden girl. Caroline was accomplished enough despite her eternal failures in their constant competitions-- she’d been Miss Mystic Falls, after all, even if Elena had been their prom queen. The problem had always been that she was jealous  _ for  _ Elena; she wanted to be the only one Elena loved, the one she went to first about everything, Elena’s  _ confidant.  _ She’d wanted that so badly for years, because that was what Elena had been for her. That was where Bonnie had been their friendship’s saving grace, moving schools in the eighth grade and completing them. Caroline had been weaned off her one-sided codependency, and given someone else to split her focus off into, a second _ best friend forever _ to make up for where the first one lacked.) 

The baby --two year old Lexi-- napped in her playpen, a blur of blankets and dark hair and thumbsucking that Caroline only saw for a minute before she was in the darkness of the garage. 

The keys Damon gave her were  _ not  _ the keys to the Camaro, and he looked disgusted even to be laying hands on them. The Camaro was hidden in the far corner of the garage beneath a custom-made tarp, undriven for who knew how long. You couldn’t exactly stick two (soon to be three) carseats in that thing. 

No, the keys in her hand were to Damon’s  _ new  _ ride. 

“You’ve got to be  _ kidding me, _ ” Caroline all but squawked, snickering. 

“Shut up. Shut  _ up _ .” Damon whined, because he was a seven year old girl. 

A seven year old girl who drove a freaking  _ minivan.  _

“I take it back. This is all worth it. Is that a  _ monogrammed vanity plate? _ ” 

***

(Anddddd… then Caroline has to go pick up Klaus, Kol’s eccentric artist older brother who ‘doesn’t fly’ ((spoiler: he totally  _ does  _ fly, but Bonnie wants to hook him and Caroline up for good and Kol is going along with the ride and making up ridiculous reasons why Caroline has to go fetch Klaus from New Orleans is  _ right  _ up his alley)) who she’s had a crush on for years and  _ also  _ totally banged when he came to New York City to talk to her museum about putting in his latest collection. Because he’s kind of a Big Deal in the art world, mostly because he’s handsome and brilliant and roguish and was voted New Orleans’ Most Eligible Bachelor for three years running, stealing it from local pro football legend and face-of-the-franchise, Marcel Gerard, who had previously held the title for two straight years. There are tumblrs devoted to pictures of Klaus Mikaelson’s  _ earlobes.  _ He’s a big deal. A big deal who has been obsessed with Caroline for years, too. 

Caroline and Klaus have wacky roadtrip misadventures, including stumbling upon the only gas station-slash-karaoke bar in the entirety of Mississippi and being shanghaied into performing a rousing rendition of ABBA’s  _ Fernando  _ whilst wearing feather boas, stumbling upon a reenactment of a Civil War battle, etc. They bicker and take care of the Bennett family dishware on their way to the Bennett-Mikaelson wedding in Miami, Florida, the base of Kol’s Underwater Basket Weaving/Treasure Hunting empire. 

They get close-ish, in Georgia, and then their car, a sensible minivan they borrowed from the Salvatores, has engine trouble and they’re forced to stop for the night and snuggle and confess their  _ feelings.  _

They’re both kinda shy and awkward the next morning and Caroline is all  _ listen Klaus, I have seen every episode of Friends and I will  _ not  _ be the one to steal Bonnie’s thunder on her wedding day  _ and they decide to keep their budding romance under wraps until after the wedding, but when Bonnie deviously hurls her bouquet straight at Caroline’s face and Klaus is assaulted by Kol and Bonnie’s garter, they are forced to share a  _ traditional  _ dance and they also share a kiss on the parquet dance floor that makes Bonnie all smug and happy and Kol happy because he loves the devilishly satisfied look his girlfriend-turned-fiancee-turned-wife gets when she’s successfully engineered one of her devious plans. And because he loves his brother. Y’know. 

Caroline is offered a job with the  _ Louvre  _ and Klaus is all  _ my brother has been meaning to expand the family business to Europe  _ and the story ends with them totally going to shack up together in an elegant little Parisian apartment so they can take over the world.) 


End file.
